The internet’s infidelity watchdogs
Public and private figures are having their indiscretions aired out online.
If you say you’ve never heard of the Try Guys…I just don’t believe you!—Kate
How do you catch a cheater in the act? It’s a question that’s haunted many a women’s magazine and fueled the plots of countless romcoms. In my case, back in college, I read my boyfriend’s Facebook messages. Another friend of mine was accidentally butt-dialed by her boyfriend during the act. In movies, you'll spot them across the street getting dinner with someone else. Sometimes—but in my experience, rarely—the cheater just confesses.
But now, if you’re lucky—or is it unlucky?—people online will find out for you, thanks to the efforts of a new guard of dedicated societal watchdogs.
Last week, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok were ablaze with the rumor that Ned Fulmer, one fourth of the BuzzFeed-turned-independent-YouTuber-collective The Try Guys, had cheated on his wife with one of the channel’s producers and had since been kicked out of the group. Various users across the Try Guys subreddit posted evidence: Screenshots of Instagram DMs, grainy videos taken at a bar, and clips from recent videos on the Try Guys’ channel that appeared to show Fulmer had been digitally removed through cuts and other editing tricks. Still, nothing was proven—until the online discourse got so loud that both the Try Guys and Fulmer released statements that, basically, confirmed it all.
The entire arc of events, from documentation to accusation to speculation to confirmation, happened online, almost solely thanks to the work of digital vigilantes who saw something and said something. In their first video since this went down, the remaining members of the Try Guys—Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang—confirm that they had no prior knowledge of the affair, and were only alerted to it by the fans who began speculating over Labor Day weekend.
Given how much we all use social media, most goings-ons take place in its town squares. Because of this accessibility, we regular people can actually have a hand in making the news and even determining how it unfolds. In 2018, I wrote about how Instagram gossip accounts were replacing tabloids, but four years later these accounts can be, and regularly are, usurped by communities that form in real time as the gossip is unfolding. While the Try Guys news was officially reported on in headlines like "Ned Fulmer Admits To Cheating On Wife," many of those reading the posts were active but unbylined participants in bringing them to fruition.
That doesn’t necessarily mean these watchdogs are always right. Twice now, Love Island fans have used out-of-context Instagram stories, social media likes, and paparazzi footage to accuse recent contestants (Davide Sanclimenti and Adam Collard) of cheating on the women they’ve been partnered with since the series aired this summer. Both instances reached the point of tabloid speculation, both resulted in nothing: The pairs are still happily together.
Cheating is a black-and-white wrong, and for that reason is irresistible to internet mobs—even if the cheating is happening between people who are not public figures. Back in January, a New York 25-year-old without even much of a social media presence was shamed across platforms and, eventually, national media, for essentially being a fuckboy. He was given the name “West Elm Caleb” by his exes, who came forward on TikTok to talk about how this serial ghoster had been leading on and then screwing over countless women in NYC. It got completely out of control—something I wrote more in depth about here—but is another example of how many on the internet feel it is their duty to serve as a de-facto watch in a neighborhood where no perceived crime is off-limits.
The intentions are ostensibly noble: These communities see a wrong, and they want to bring about justice. How long would Fulmer’s inappropriate workplace affair have continued unnoticed if it weren’t for the fans? But on the flip side, how much pain could have been avoided had none of this unfolded so publicly?
These grainy bar videos and callout-TikToks and overall impulse to use the internet for accountability at any scale are pushing us deeper into the self-imposed surveillance state we already live in. Private inter-personal matters are aired out publicly, adding a whole new layer of trauma to the experience. I’m not saying we shouldn’t know about Fulmer’s infidelity—he was a wife guy, after all. But in the all-or-nothing world of the internet, publicly exacting justice produces a lot of shrapnel.